It's been a while since I talked about LEO.
For the most part I've been super annoyed about the bear market, illiquid bridges, depegged tokens, declining prices, buggy frontend, etc. Blah blah blah, classic fud stuff. Today I'm looking to talk about something a bit more optimistic. A lot of changes are being made to the platform.
For one I'm being told that a change to the reward pool is being made to financially incentivize the frontend. Basically no emissions will be allocated to comments that are posted from other frontends. I can't say I particularly agree with this move, but it makes sense on a certain level. Those who want LEO rewards should be using the inleo website. Simple enough equation.
I had a couple of follow up questions to this change that were answered yesterday. We'll still be able to distribute leo token rewards and earn curation with upvotes on other platforms. In addition, posting from other frontends are still eligible for ad-revenue sharing. So only earning rewards from the reward pool is being limited to inleo posts. Everything else should pretty much stay the same.
Ad revenue sharing
This is something that I haven't been really keeping tabs on but Khal and the rest of the community have been harping on it for quite some time now. Personally I have very mixed feelings on the whole thing. Ad revenue sharing is an extremely WEB2-type business model. It can't really be done in a decentralized way... or it could be, but creating that type of infrastructure from the ground up would be a huge pain and not really worth the effort within the current climate. That's more of a "this will happen when crypto goes mainstream" type of deal.
YouTube, Twitter, and Twitch do it; why not LEO?
Ad Revenue sharing is essentially a subset of affiliate marketing. When someone is an affiliate of another company they will sell that company's product and get to keep some of the profits. This is a business model that's been around a long time. Sign users up for a poker site and you'll make 10% of whatever they spend inside the casino. Sell products on Amazon and take your cut.
In fact affiliate marketing is so popular that more than 80% of all brands do it (more than 100k businesses). The biggest one unsurprisingly being Amazon with an astonishing 44% market share. The reason why this tactic is so popular is that the financial incentives synergize well and contracting work has a low overhead cost. It also can't be exploited easily because no one is getting paid by the hour and everyone earns their fair share based on what they brought in. In essence this tactic mimics a permissionless system because anyone can do it, so in that way it is compatible with crypto and WEB3.
Ad revenue sharing takes the affiliate marketing tactic and focuses it further into the attention economy. The idea being that users are creating content that people want to see (like YouTube videos). In order to financially incentivize those users to create better content and potentially even go pro: the platform has to share their ad revenue with them. Again, this is a very common tactic but it comes with some serious caveats.
The biggest one we've been seeing time and time again is that once a platform "makes it" they engage in corrupt behavior. Users will get demonetized by the centralized entity. Sometimes this action is justified, and sometimes it is not. The point is that the founders of the company get to decide who makes money and who doesn't. Using this leverage they often will censor certain points of view by scaring users away from talking about certain issues or just full on shadow-banning them from the algorithm.
Could something like that happen on LEO?
Hm, yeah it totally could, but the result would not be the same. First of all as a network that basically prides itself on free speech and decentralization a move like that would have exponentially more blowback than WEB2. It would also not be as effective because the users that get demonetized would still have a fully accessible Hive account and their associated followers list would remain unmolested. We've actually never seen something like this happen yet because crypto is simply way too new of a technology without mainstream adoption; So it would be hard to guess exactly how it would go down for real.
WoW... 1000 LEO... really?
Hm, so yeah I was just looking at my LEO rewards for the first time in a very long time and I noticed I got 978 LEO from @leoads on January 18th. That's basically my cut for one month if I'm understanding it correctly. Which, as the title of this post implies, is actually kind of impressive.
Basically the entire reason I never mentioned this type of revenue sharing on LEO is because I was highly skeptical of the whole thing. LEO is a tiny tiny platform. My posts are not going to get a lot of clicks. I just assumed the amount of money we were talking about was basically just going to round to zero and be completely meaningless. This has proven to not be the case so now I must admit my mistake and refactor my position.
$50 is not a trivial amount of money
This is especially true because that's the amount I earned without even trying. I don't pay attention to SEO. I don't try to inject my message across other platforms. I don't try to optimize my content for views or repost links on Twitter or where ever else. I still may just continue what I'm doing, but that's not the point. The point is that I now have a financial incentive to change my behavior.
Outward facing incentives.
That's the thing about affiliate marketing and why it's so powerful. The users suddenly have a monetary incentive to shill the brand and shuffle more people over to it. Within that context it makes perfect sense as to why the LEO reward pool would be changed to only reward inleo posts. If the platform is shifting to an ad-revenue model then it can't make that revenue is people are going to other sites. Fair enough; I will allow it.
Just imagine how much that would be at $1 LEO!
So imagine that during the bull market the LEO token spikes to $1 a coin. Now how much ad revenue am I generating? Like $1000 a month, right? Hm, nope, not how it works. It's still $50 (50 LEO per month). Obviously a company buying ad-space is going to be paying in USD. LEO takes that USD and distributes it as LEO via market buybacks from the spot orderbook. I'm not magically generating more ad revenue just because the LEO token price went up. However all the ad money I made during the bear market will be worth a ton if I just hold it into the bull.
Wait... does that create elasticity?
It does, actually, which is again kind of impressive and very good tokenomics. If the platform has a constant stream of USD coming in and engaging in token buybacks that's really good for the bear market and pretty much meaningless during the bull market when valuations are overblown and the price of the token is high. In theory this could make LEO have less volatility during the 4-year crypto cycle, which is always nice to see.
There are a couple problems with this theory (like assuming users are going to hold their rewards) but for the most part it should help even if it's just a little bit. More importantly: LEO will be much more visible to the outside world if content creators have a big incentive to engage in this particular flavor of affiliate marketing.
So how much is inleo sharing with users?
Affiliate marketers are lucky if they can make even 20%-30% of the product they are actually selling. Sometimes it's more like 5%-10%. Many would ask why so low and claim it's not fair, but if you sell computer for $1000 and the company that builds the computers only makes $200 off the sale, then a 10% commission of $100 is actually 50% of the profit.
Meanwhile, ad revenue models can share a bit more because everything is digital and delivering the service to the user has a lower overhead cost. Twitch.TV shares like 50% of their revenue through the subscription program, while YouTube gives their creators a 'generous' 55%.
Cool story, bro: LEO gives 100%
That's the magic of WEB3 I guess... by having a native token to govern the platform the LEO community can offer a 100% revenue sharing model, which is actually kind of insane when we realize that no WEB2 system would ever be able to match that on a fundamental business level. It's mathematically impossible in WEB2, but with LEO it's not. That's some serious competition right there.
Conclusion
I'm still not 100% sold on this whole idea but I definitely am taking it a lot more seriously. But you know what is 100%? The amount of revenue sharing inleo is offering to its users. Noice. Can't beat that.
If there's one thing this development should teach us it's that we need more outward facing incentives across the entire platform. We need a reason for users on Hive to actively engage with others outside the ecosystem to bring them in. Assuming that this revenue-sharing model actually has success going forward it's certainly something we can revisit and apply to other frontends should the situation warrant it.
With all due respect to everyone in this comment section
Please RTFD before you comment - https://labs.inleo.io/@leofinance/the-first-ever-leoads-distribution-hive-creators-on-inleo-are-earning-100-of-ad-revenue
So it's an 80% cut per post, provided content creator reaches minimum 200 views on their own. That's for "Evergreen." Views on sites other than Inleo do not count...
Or one can stake a minimum 500 LEO and buy a share of this ad revenue, provided they're at least a little bit active on the site. And 500LP is one step above "dust" payout.
P.S. I wasn't aware of the existence of that post until now. Thanks for sharing though.
Classic - too bad images posted on InLeo do not display on the other Hive front ends.
Arrogance reigns
What does one have to do to qualify for ad revenue?
You need to have staked LEO as well ... it pays on leo power
Hey man.
Yeah I figured that out after asking. I looked at the entire payout, all the names.
So basically, this model, if someone on the outside wanted to start today in order to take advantage of this "100% share of ad revenue," they'd quickly find out all their efforts were for nothing, because there are hundreds if not thousands of middlemen in between the platform and the content creator taking their share first.
Or the content creator starting today can first buy in and stake some tokens. They then get a share, but they're also in debt. So they technically wouldn't be earning a dime of that ad revenue until they break even. That could take a very long time.
Unfortunately I'm not impressed with how this all looks. Certainly doesn't encourage me to use the platform. The stakeholders basically hoard the value of all the attention generated, stripping it from both the content creators and consumers at the same time, while standing on the sidelines.
Maybe I'm missing something but for an actual content creator, this model could potentially be the worst deal on the entire internet.
The day comes a content creator finally wants to pay themselves. What happens? Possibly unstake a few tokens, effectively giving themselves a lasting pay cut for the future.
@yieldgrower is saying he got a $75 payout and he's only got 20k LEO powered up.
I have over 250k Leo power.
Clearly I should have learned more before writing this.
But then again I take people on their word when they market things a certain way.
I assumed I got $50 because I have hundreds of posts on LEO that are getting some amount of traffic. Not so sure how it works now. I'll ask in Discord.
Traffic generators also earn from the ad revenue without having any stake through evergreen rewards.
There are two ways to earn from here: have stake or generate traffic.
cc @nonameslefttouse
Does that payout from roughly ten days ago include evergreen rewards?
It does, but there are hardly any evergreen rewards, we need to up our SEO and outreach game, the main purpose of evergreen rewards is to encourage authors to promote their high level posts outside of hive and maybe that way we'll bring more eyes into hive = incentivizing the outreach.
I've been a huge proponent of moving a part of the reward pool towards outreach and promotion, and rewards authors based on clicks and views and not just based on arbitrary criteria set by each community member, but that hasn't gotten any traction, but hopefully this one will.
The goal is that at one point the evergreen rewards dwarf the hive rewards, but who knows if we'll ever get there.
Yieldgrower got 75... tokens. Not dollars.
lol right I see the $LEO and think USD.
next post will explain all the fuckups I made in this one.
I learned a little bit more. 200 view minimum for evergreen rewards to kick in. I've been able to achieve that on PeakD a few times organically from the local consumer base. Now all I need to do is tell them stop viewing there and go somewhere else so I can get paid...
Do I really want to be that guy?
Or the other option is to wait and hope the consumer base grows on inleo because others did that, then show up and leech off their efforts.
Do I really wan to be that guy?
LOL. Still early in the game. Hopefully things become a little more clear as time progresses. As soon as we're seeing content creators at the top of that payout list earning from evergreen, I think that's when it becomes attractive. "80%" doesn't mean much until then.
I'll tag @khaleelkazi here if he can clearfy further, as yes I find your points valid.
Just something to add is, imagin if this add thing didnt existied, as it was till now. Users get just the incetive from people curating their content and earning tokens from that... this revenue can be an aditional incetive for them to keep those tokens and bring in more revenue....
For sure the dude deserves to hear and might have something to add or adjust. I'm not knocking anyone down. Just the model seems a bit out of whack.
People need to know stacking tokens isn't something your typical content creator wants to be doing. I realize on Hive that's like saying all the swear words in one sentence but, it's true. They want to monetize their work and pay their bills, just like anyone else in the workforce.
Stacking tokens and acquiring perks is more suited to consumers. They want more bang for their buck. So in this scenario, they buy the tokens to support the work. They get a share of the ad revenue with this model. They turn around and use that to support content creators they came to see and support. Support levels grow naturally due to all these systems in place. Content creator can cash out, and some of that money goes back into creating better content for the consumer, incentivizing them to buy and hold more.
Still, the content creator would want a share of the ad revenue as well. They get the ball rolling in this attention economy. Screw them over, and they go someplace else.
Just want to add, this scenario where the consumer is receiving ad revenue in this fashion, then paying it forward by supporting content with votes; in a sense the content creator is receiving that ad revenue indirectly from the consumer, over time. Not a bad thing at all... just different.
it looks like Ninja stake at Steemit 😎
I'd say give this 6-12 months before making a comparison like that. On the surface it does appear to be a bit top-heavy but it's only the first payout. At this point I don't even know if anything qualified to receive "evergreen rewards." Oddly enough the pinned posts from the team stand a good chance...
Of course, it's not comparable, it's more like a metaphor, I've already replied to someone, but as far as I'm concerned it's ok, because the prize is a second-layer token, and they're supposedly going to make sure that the tokenomics comes out. But, at the end of the day, it just looks a bit more sophisticated to me than a voting bot to which you delegate something and get a reward in its token
I want to see it succeed but I'm confused. If 1000 content creators all get 199 views, that's 199000 views to the site, but not one content creator qualified for "evergreen rewards" so all that money goes to stakeholders instead.
Or maybe once again I'm missing something. I dunno...
Hm nothing except tag leo, inleo, or leofinance (or use the inleo frontend).
But I mean most people should just use the frontend so they can get the upvote rewards as well.
So I see one comment here claiming you made 10x more than them. What did you have to do to earn 10x more than them? Or what were they missing?
I'm increasingly intrigued by INLEO... they are definitely working their butts off to add new features and just do things, which puts them head and shoulders above pretty much all other Hive-based communities.
Yeah, revenue sharing is very Web2, but in a broader sense Web3 still needs to have "products" and "revenue sources," it can't all just be magical unicorn sprinkles that appear out of thin air. What I mean is, I expect we'll have to embrace that there will be "Web 2.5," then *"Web 2.7," and so forth until we get there.
Very nice! You got about 10x what I did. I am not complaining about my take. The promise of Ad Revenue is one of the reasons I have held onto my Leo for as long as I have.
Yeah that's about what I was expecting or less.
Now I'm wondering which of my posts are actually getting traffic.
Then again there are hundreds.
Isn't this just ad revenue though? Does that include the evergreen rewards as well?
I recieved 75 $LEO and I was not really posting much. I can now see how powerful Evergreen Rewards are going to be moving forward!
People in the comments are saying this kickback is based on powered up stake.
But I have over 10x more powered up stake than you.
Can you confirm that you only have 20k LEO powered up?
correct, also it was 75 $LEO
I've seen people hustling much harder on X and earning much less than that per month. I am wondering if other front ends might now follow suit and implement ads too.
Incentives either at work place , in marriage, or any where keeps the people engaged and happy and lack of it leads to dissatisfaction. Honestly , working with good incentives is same as under employed. For a project to prosper , a cross chain relationship should be encouraged for this is the that decentralized technology births.
#incentives
#inleo
Either I’m dense (a real possibility) or the inleo.io interface doesn’t work very well in an iOS mobile environment. Top-level posting in particular. Easy with PeakD, easyish with hive.blog, a struggle with inleo.
I'm using IOS mobile and I'm not experiencing issues, perhaps you can clear cookies and cache for inleo.io
This fixed all the issues for me because I was running an older version of the website.
Please try this and let me know if it works for you :D
Gave that a go, will try a top-level post from inleo.io tomorrow. Thanks.
Nope, still doesn’t work for me. The inleo.io interface destroys my formatting. I type up posts in Notes and copy-paste into PeakD which works just fine. Tried the same thing with inleo and this is what the preview looked like:
Yeah that's a big reason why I've been ignoring it while they fix their shit.
They changed a lot of things and broke even more in the process.
I don't know what to call it, but if your ad revenue depends on how many LEOs you stake, and not on views or click-through, then that's Ninja stake ad revenue for me, like Steemit case.
I mean it's nothing like that because a ninjamine means money was printed out of thin air.
Not only printed out of thin air but in an unfair way that cuts people out of the system that were trying to participate according to the stated rules.
This is just distribution based on... stake?
Unclear I'm still learning more.
@yieldgrowder claims to have gotten a $75 payout with a lot less powered up than me.
Need to follow up on this, clearly.
Of course, it's not, but it's a metaphor because I don't know if it has anything to do with advertising, I understand advertising as pay-per-view or pay-per-click. I am sure Leo has contracts with advertisers in that way. And it is aimed at the inner circle, the Hive users, or those who have the most Leo tokens.
I can't imagine how to convince an outsider to join and then explain to him that he gets paid for advertising in the form of internal tokens, but only if he stakes them...
To me it's almost the same as having a voting bot that rewards me based on how much I've delegated to it, it's a bit more subtle :)
But, let's say as long as the reward is in a second-layer token it's fine...
Incorrect as you can come in with 0 LEO POWER and earn revenue by sweat equity: make blog posts that get views and you get 80% of the revenue of those views. Only 20% goes to LEO POWER holders from your views and that is to support the people who curate / upvote you.
Again, you can have 0 staked.
Please read the post to gain an understanding - https://labs.inleo.io/@leofinance/the-first-ever-leoads-distribution-hive-creators-on-inleo-are-earning-100-of-ad-revenue
I admit I haven't read all these terms, but it's clearer now. Anyway, I mentioned that as far as I am concerned, I don't see anything wrong with the payment being made with a second-layer token. It's yours and you care for its tokenomics.
I had long wondered why this was not implemented on all the front ends. So much is earned with advertising and it's important that this and other revenue comes into the ecosystem.
The ad revenue is based on your staked LEO. LeoPower. Not on clicks or traffic. The clicks and traffic part will increase the revenue generated from the ads, which will be divided out to all LeoPower holders based on stake.
The Evergreen stuff is still in the works....and needs a LOT of clicks to kick in. At least that's the way I understand it. I mean, I think it's technically there, but you need like 200 page views or more to see anything....and I think that's after the 7 day initial voting window closes. In other words, you have to write something that will be clicked on later by lots of people. Thus the reason taskmaster is putting together the #musiconleo playlists...
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Outstanding! I could be wrong, but I'm confidant that the Leo community will not allow ads to wreck our cool free speech bennies.
As long as it is khal doing something, I don't care about it.
He burned too many bridges with Polycub for me, and I see his projects as nothing more than grifting.
is Polycub DEAD?
It died with vexPOLYCUB. Because income from the treasury that was supposed to be allocated to LP rewards got allocated to vexPOLYCUB. Anything regarding vexPOLYCUB was a one-man show. There was no DAO vote on whether it should be implemented or if it were to be implemented how it should.
We don't know what khal is doing with PolyCUB's "treasury", or how much is in it. We were all supposed to be able to see the treasury and its allocation. This was promised at the start of the project. A promise unkempt for 2 years now.
Clearly you don't keep up with the updates
It's all on-chain. It's a lot smaller than expected and a few big whales accumulated a lot of the POLYCUB early on, dumped a majority of it and then kept de-voting my proposals
At the end of the day, we launched it with a DAO and the DAO continually denied proposals to help the project. Eventually, I'm sure these whales will see that the proposals we keep pushing are there to help it along and will approve it. Until that day comes, there's simply not much that can be done
But regardless. Think how you want to think. I've been at this a long time and the people that matter know my integrity and know that I've never walked away from one of these projects. The LeoTeam gives their all in trying to make things work. Some experiments succeed while others fail. We keep trying
Where is the DAO treasury page khal? I am pretty sure that one has nothing to do with PIPs?
Have you published a report on DAO Treasury since forever? What have been done with the treasury?
Did you do a PIP for vexPOLYCUB, something that changes the governance structure utterly? I don't remember there being such.
Did you do a PIP for diverting what should have gone to LP rewards to vexPOLYCUB, a change that fundementally changed how POLYCUB worked?
Only PIP that got denied is the last one you proposed (PIP3). No other PIP have been proposed since then?
You are blaming DAO for your blunders khal. You got carried on Curve's governance wars as you put it and implemented changes to POLYCUB's structure unilatirally.
Anyway I know that you would try to deflect these questions as much as possible.
!WOC
Fantastic job, Woc by @edicted! kairke(5/8) is truly impressed by the dedication and effort you invested in creating this post. Keep up the outstanding work!
Creating quality content has paid off! @kairke has sent you 0.3 WGOLD as a thank you for your efforts.
BTW! WGOLD is the token of the War of Clans ecosystem, you can use it to have discounts in all our games or stake it and earn rewards now!
What are the things we can do so we can also benefit from it?
My posts are not going to get a lot of clicks - I wish that were true though , your contents are clicks friendly!
How can someone start this journey it looks profitable
Those who staked LEO can get ads revenue by clicking the ads?
3 posts in a row from inleo.io.
This is the way.
that is very cool Inleo stuff!
The best advertisement of using InLeo.
Got to say I am mightily frustrated at the way InLeo images do not display properly in Hive.blog which I use all the time. My community is there.